When I graduated from college, most of my friends were in the arts or tech and tech-adjacent fields. My peers—upper-class, per the typical ivy league demographic—are extremely mobile. (Perhaps destructively so.) Most have moved a couple times as their careers get moving, scooting between the metro areas that tend to hold the tech, design, and art jobs.
One of my goals in going into environmental engineering was to do work deeply grounded in the specific geographic conditions of the place of the work, to avoid becoming a yuppie bouncing between metropolises without getting deeply invested in them, uninvolved in local and community-driven work.
But over the past decade this is exactly what I've been. I went from metro Detroit to metro Chicago to Providence (metro Boston?) to Los Angeles to the Bay Area, with stints in New York City. I suspect I'm looking for rootedness precisely because I haven't had it. I want to "Find a place [I] trust, and then try trusting it for awhile."
My response to this has been that there are really only two career paths I think about: as an environmental engineer/scientist, or as a teacher, because they are precisely roles that cannot be done asynchronously, cannot be done remotely, and cannot be abstracted too far without losing their value. Something directly tangible.
I went to the Storms, Flooding, & Sea Level Defense Conference this week in Oakland. The great part of the work discussed, the worst part of it, too, is that it is extremely hard to generalize. Every city is different, every port is different, every place is different—so we can learn lessons from our neighbors but not apply the same logic. There is so much work to do, first in understanding these hyper-local systems, and then acting on that understanding!
(As an aside... many of the proposed policy actions for addressing SLR at the conference were, essentially, "waiting for the numbers" and waiting until we have high levels of confidence in our climate models, so as to not over-invest in infrastructure. I understand the political need to avoid setting aside too much money for hypothetical scenarios, but we know plenty to take action anyway. One speaker called this out, and encouraged people to make "tipping point plans," which outline actions taken at different levels of SLR as they come, per a Dutch approach, rather than waiting for far-off benchmarks. I recognize the limits and colonialism present in applying Dutch strategies, but also want to respect their cohesive approaches!)
If you have anxiety around "not doing anything" about climate change and have the ability to afford altering your career path, please do so, there are so many opportunities. Think hard about your communities' needs or things like the list of Sustainable Development Goals, and choose a problem (and place?) to work deeply on. I don't yet know yet where my next move will bring me, but I hope it's the last one for some time.
Rooting,
Lukas
One of my goals in going into environmental engineering was to do work deeply grounded in the specific geographic conditions of the place of the work, to avoid becoming a yuppie bouncing between metropolises without getting deeply invested in them, uninvolved in local and community-driven work.
But over the past decade this is exactly what I've been. I went from metro Detroit to metro Chicago to Providence (metro Boston?) to Los Angeles to the Bay Area, with stints in New York City. I suspect I'm looking for rootedness precisely because I haven't had it. I want to "Find a place [I] trust, and then try trusting it for awhile."
My response to this has been that there are really only two career paths I think about: as an environmental engineer/scientist, or as a teacher, because they are precisely roles that cannot be done asynchronously, cannot be done remotely, and cannot be abstracted too far without losing their value. Something directly tangible.
I went to the Storms, Flooding, & Sea Level Defense Conference this week in Oakland. The great part of the work discussed, the worst part of it, too, is that it is extremely hard to generalize. Every city is different, every port is different, every place is different—so we can learn lessons from our neighbors but not apply the same logic. There is so much work to do, first in understanding these hyper-local systems, and then acting on that understanding!
(As an aside... many of the proposed policy actions for addressing SLR at the conference were, essentially, "waiting for the numbers" and waiting until we have high levels of confidence in our climate models, so as to not over-invest in infrastructure. I understand the political need to avoid setting aside too much money for hypothetical scenarios, but we know plenty to take action anyway. One speaker called this out, and encouraged people to make "tipping point plans," which outline actions taken at different levels of SLR as they come, per a Dutch approach, rather than waiting for far-off benchmarks. I recognize the limits and colonialism present in applying Dutch strategies, but also want to respect their cohesive approaches!)
If you have anxiety around "not doing anything" about climate change and have the ability to afford altering your career path, please do so, there are so many opportunities. Think hard about your communities' needs or things like the list of Sustainable Development Goals, and choose a problem (and place?) to work deeply on. I don't yet know yet where my next move will bring me, but I hope it's the last one for some time.
Rooting,
Lukas